Neil J. RubenkingSophos Home Premium (for Mac)Sophos Home Premium offers Mac antivirus protection at a very reasonable price, but the absence of many advanced features found in the Windows edition is disappointing.

Sophos Home Premium offers Mac antivirus protection at a very reasonable price, but the absence of many advanced features found in the Windows edition is disappointing.

Sophos is a big name in enterprise-level security. With Sophos Home Premium on the Mac and the corresponding Windows product, the developers have brought a good dollop of that high-powered antivirus technology to ordinary users. Even the free products (on both platforms) offer convenient and powerful protection. Paying for Premium gets you a boatload of advanced features on Windows. Alas, most of these don't make it over to the macOS edition. Sophos Home Premium still provides good protection for Mac users at a reasonable price, however.

Big businesses don't leave antivirus protection to their untrained employees. Rather, the IT Security department manages everything remotely. Sophos Home works the same way. You sign up for an online account, then either download the product to the device you're using or send an email link to install it elsewhere. All configuration occurs in the online console. Are you the go-to tech support agent for your family? With Sophos, instead of having to drive across town to help Cousin Mel with her antivirus, you can handle it all remotely.

The user interface for the local antivirus agent is about as streamlined as you can get. Clicking the product's icon in the menu bar displays a tiny widget that reports security status and any recent notifications. From its menu you can launch a scan, manage your devices, check for updates, and set preferences. Choosing device management or preferences sends you to the online dashboard.

Pricing and OS Support

Mac users often justify skipping antivirus protection on the basis that there just isn't a lot of Mac malware. Why spend money on something you might not need? Mac malware is on the rise, however, so you really should install protection.

The most common price point for Mac antivirus is just under $40 per year for a single license. Half of the current products fit that model, and most of those give you three licenses for $59.99 per year. With McAfee AntiVirus Plus (for Mac), that $59.99 subscription price gets you not three licenses but unlimited licenses. You can install it on all the macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS devices in your household.

Compared to these commercial products (well, perhaps all but McAfee), Sophos is a bargain. For $50 you can install Sophos Home Premium on up to 10 devices, Mac or PC, and manage them remotely. At $5 per device per year, it isn't free, but it sure isn't expensive.

My experience has been that Mac users are more likely to keep their operating systems fully updated than their Windows-loving counterparts. Even so, not everyone has the very latest macOS installed. Like McAfee, Sophos supports older versions back to Yosemite (10.10). That's a change since the previous edition, which went all the way back to Mountain Lion (10.8). Avira Free Antivirus for Mac, Norton, and Trend Micro require at least El Capitan (10.11), the toughest OS requirement of my current collection of Mac antivirus products.

Online Dashboard Differences

As with the free edition, clicking Manage Devices or Preferences from the Sophos widget's menu takes you to the online dashboard. You can also just log in directly from any browser. The main page lists your protected devices. If you haven't used up all 10 licenses, you can click Add Device to either install on the device you're using or send a link by email. If you've replaced one of your computers, you can remove it from the dashboard, freeing up that license for reuse.

The difference between the Windows and macOS editions are more pronounced in the premium edition. You just get more with Sophos Home Premium on Windows. The Status page looks the same, with panels for Antivirus Protection, Web Protection, Ransomware Protection, Privacy Protection, and Malicious Traffic Detection, but when you dig deeper the differences become evident.

The General sub-page, below Protection, looks the same on both platforms. Clicking Ransomware gets you a simple on/off switch for Ransomware Protection, but the Master Boot Record Protection component, available for Windows devices, isn't there. The Exploits sub-page, home to the most advanced features, doesn't appear at all for Macs. That means you don't get protection against known attacks on vulnerable applications. You don't get the somewhat-arcane Risk Reduction features. Since there are no protected applications, you also don't get the glowing green border and see-through tags that identify such applications in Windows.

On the Web sub-page, all you get is protection against known dangerous websites plus the list of any sites you've exempted from that filter. Windows users get Download Reputation checking, a feature that proved useful in my testing. And Safe Online Banking in the Windows edition includes keystroke encryption, to protect your browsers from keyloggers.

Features Shared With the Free Edition

The basic antivirus protection in this product is the same as you get with Sophos Home Free. If you want more detail than my summary below, please read that article.

Bitdefender and Kaspersky received certification both from AV-Test and from AV-Comparatives, with 100 percent protection in both cases. Both also eliminated 100 percent of Windows malware. Looking at details from AV-Test, both got the top score against both Mac and Windows malware. Bitdefender also maxed out against Mac-focused Potentially Unwanted Applications (PUAs). Surprisingly, Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac earned one of the lowest scores in the latest test using Mac PUAs; it has done much better in the past.

A full scan of the Apple MacBook Air 13-Inch I use for testing took 20 minutes, a bit faster than average. Unlike the Windows edition, Sophos for Mac defaults to a fast scan that just looks at the most common places for malware. I still suggest running a full scan upon installation. Afterward, the real-time protection component should protect against any new threats. Note that the Premium edition on Windows includes a deep-digging cleanup tool called Sophos Home Cleaner, designed to root out the last traces of malware.

I'm not equipped to test Mac antivirus with active malware, but I did challenge Sophos with my current Windows malware collection. It eliminated all of the actual malware samples, and waited for my decision before removing PUAs. That makes sense; they are only potentially unwanted, after all.

From the online console, you can configure parental control content filtering for each of your devices. There's no option to impose filtering on a per-user basis. The content filter correctly blocked all the raunchy sites I tried. However, like the similar feature in Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac it can't filter HTTPS traffic. Using a secure anonymizing proxy (and don't assume your child doesn't know what that is!) totally defeats the content filter.

Phishing sites don't contain any malware. They just masquerade as secure sites and troll for victims foolish enough to enter their login credentials. Phishing trends and techniques change all the time, so I score my phishing test as a comparison against other products. Sophos came in with a detection rate 7 percent lower than that of Symantec Norton Security Premium under Windows. That's lower than when I last tested it, but Sophos retained its position in the chart.

Do note that while phishing is platform-independent, phishing protection need not be so. Tested simultaneously with its Windows cousin, Symantec Norton Security Deluxe (for Mac) came in 14 percentage points lower.

Ransomware Protection

On Windows boxes, a typical ransomware attack surreptitiously encrypts important files and demands ransom in untraceable currency before it will decrypt them. A few completely lock your system by encrypting the hard drive. Android ransomware attacks tend to be the system-lock type. Ransomware exists for macOS, too, mostly the file-encryption type. Upgrading from the free edition to premium adds ransomware protection, a big benefit.

Tested on Windows, Sophos detected and prevented attack by all but one of my ransomware samples. That includes the nasty Petya that attempts to encrypt the entire hard drive. Missing one ransomware attack is no big deal, because my Windows test systems are virtual machines. I just roll the VM back to a state before the infection. Sophos also protected against 9 of 10 attacks simulated by KnowBe4's RanSim.

I can't test behavior-based ransomware protection on Mac for several reasons. My Mac test system is a physical laptop, not a virtual machine, so one missed sample could wreak havoc. And RanSim is strictly a Windows tool. But the component that handles detecting and thwarting encrypting malware is CryptoGuard, the same as in the Windows edition.

Avast Security, Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac, and Trend Micro also offer ransomware protection, but they attack the problem very differently. Rather than looking for ransomware behavior, they prevent modification of sensitive files by unauthorized programs. This technique can be effective, but it only works on the contents of folders that you've flagged for protection.

Webcam and Mic Spyware Protection

One of the creepier kinds of spyware triggers your webcam without turning the light on, so some creeper can spy on you. Not many Mac security products offer webcam protection, and it's not always as sophisticated as in Windows equivalents. For example, on Windows, Kaspersky's spyware protection component warns you when an unknown program tries to peek at you through the webcam, with the option to blacklist it. The Mac edition tones this down to a simple on/off switch for the webcam; leave it off when you're not actively using it.

With Sophos, it's the other way around. Webcam protection in the Windows edition of Sophos Home Premium is even more rudimentary than Kaspersky's on macOS. When a program starts using the webcam, Sophos slides in a transient notification. That's it. There's no blacklist or whitelist, and if you're not looking, you might miss the notification.

The Mac edition is more sophisticated. It always allows webcam access by known programs such as FaceTime and PhotoBooth. When it detects an unknown program attempting to use the camera, it slides in a notification, with buttons to Allow or Stop access. To whitelist a program, so it's always allowed, you open the main window and click Allow Always.

When the whitelist has at least one item, the main window's menu gets a new choice, Webcam/Microphone Exceptions. Clicking this gets a list of whitelisted programs, and clicking one of them removes it from the list. My Sophos contacts tell me that the Windows edition will upgrade to this more sophisticated system soon.

Better on Windows

Your subscription to Sophos Home Premium lets you install and remotely manage antivirus protection on up to 10 PCs or Macs. However, a large contingent of advanced security features found in the Window edition don't show up for Macs. Among these Windows-only features are exploit protection, advanced malware cleaning, defense against whole-disk encrypting ransomware, and banking protection. Sure, the product is inexpensive, but you get a lot more bang for your buck on a PC.

Our Editors' Choice products for Mac antivirus are Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac and Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac. Both get high marks from two independent labs. Bitdefender offers ransomware protection. Kaspersky watches for webcam spyware, and includes a parental control system markedly better than what you get with Sophos. If your focus is Mac protection, one of these two should do the job.

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About the Author

Neil Rubenking served as vice president and president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years when the IBM PC was brand new. He was present at the formation of the Association of Shareware Professionals, and served on its board of directors. In 1986, PC Magazine brought Neil on board to handle the torrent of Turbo Pascal tips submitted b... See Full Bio

Sophos Home Premium (for Mac)

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